Jan. 12, 2018, 9:55 a.m.

Boulders, logs and a carpet of mud in front of a house along San Ysidro Creek near East Valley Road in Montecito. (Mike Eliason / Santa Barbara County Fire Department)

Late Monday, Josie Gower stacked two rows of sandbags around her home in Montecito and settled in for the night.

Her home on East Valley Road was in the voluntary evacuation zone for the storm expected to sweep through the area.

Gower was not concerned. She told her family that she had weathered worse than the storm she believed was on its way, including the Thomas fire — the largest in California’s recorded history — just one month before.

Advertisement

>

Jan. 12, 2018, 9:37 a.m.

The Thomas fire began its destructive march 30 miles east of Montecito on Dec. 4. Two weeks later, the blaze had begun to bear down on the city, eventually leaving fire-scarred hillsides prone to deadly mudflows.

Thomas fire progression

The Thomas fire became California's largest wildfire on record, burning more than 280,000 acres across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

On Wednesday morning, Liana Mortazavi, 49, sat in the frame of the back door of the duplex where her mom has lived for nearly 40 years along Olive Mill Road.

She had driven from San Jose on Tuesday night and slogged her way through mud with a childhood friend to reach her 88-year-old mother, Gloria Hebert.

The front door was blocked by a tree, mud and debris. When they got inside the house, they pushed up a couch against the front door to keep more mud from seeping in. When Mortazavi measured the mud around the house where she'd grown up, she said there was 14-1/2 inches all around the house.

Jan. 10, 2018, 12:37 p.m.

Around 10 a.m. Wednesday, about half a dozen search-and-rescue crews, working in the wake of devastating rain and mudflows, began looking for missing people along Olive Mill Road and Hot Springs Road here.

Moving through a few feet of mud, rescuers looked inside wrecked cars and destroyed homes. Nearby, about a dozen nursing home staffers from Casa Dorinda braced the mud — many wearing sandals and sneakers— not expecting to see the level of devastation that now engulfed the street.

The nursing home employs 150 people and has around 300 residents. Many residents didn’t leave despite being under a voluntary evacuation order. One portion of the nursing home was destroyed.

First-responders plan to launch aerial rescues at daybreak for those residents, all of whom are safe.

“So far there isn’t a concern about anybody being in any potential danger in that area,” said Rosie Narez, a spokeswoman for the multiagency storm response. “There’s no way in or out, so I mean, at some point … you’re going to run out of stuff, so you’re going to need help.”

Jan. 9, 2018, 9:24 p.m.

At the evacuation shelter at Santa Barbara City College, someone taped up a white poster with the words “message board” scrawled in black.

Written below, in blue, was “Augie & Karen Johnson,” with a question mark in front of their names.

Other names, also next to question marks, filled the page, which turned into a makeshift forum for people to search for loved ones. They left their phone numbers on yellow sticky notes asking strangers to please call, sometimes telling the missing that they loved them.